The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (25 page)

Sophia, however, was not the only reference to a Sacred Feminine presence within early Christianity. Other female imagery for the divine existed, but unfortunately it, too, was located within the Gnostic Christian communities. We might never have known about it if it hadn't been for a group of ancient manuscripts—gospels written in the fourth century—that were discovered in an earthen jar in 1945 at the base of some cliffs in Egypt. A stunning discovery, the manuscripts contained forty previously unknown works from the Christian Gnostic tradition. The texts, which had circulated as early scripture, gradually came to be attacked as early as 150 C.E. and were not accepted into the canon, or the orthodox Bible.

It wasn't until the late sixties and early seventies that copies of the Gnostic writings became available to the West. Elaine Pagels at Princeton, one of the scholars who translated them into English, says that the main thing distinguishing the Gnostic gospels from the orthodox gospels is their abundance of powerful feminine imagery of the Divine.
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They reveal that many early Christians described and worshiped God as dyad, a being consisting of both masculine and feminine elements. They prayed to both the divine Father and the divine Mother—to Mother-Father. One of their prayers, still intact, begins, “From thee, Father, and through Thee, Mother, the two immortal names, Parents of the divine being.”
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The Gnostic gospels also referred to the Holy Spirit as female. The
Secret Book of John
, for example (one of the gospels that was rejected from the list of books that were to comprise the New Testament), describes a vision John had after the crucifixion:

As I was grieving . . . a unity in three forms appeared to me, and I marvelled: how can a unity have three forms? . . . It said to me, “John, why do you doubt . . . ? I am the One who is with you always: I am the Father; I am the Mother; I am the Son.”
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In other Gnostic books, the Gospel to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Thomas, which also were not included in the New Testament, Jesus himself speaks of “my Mother, the Spirit” and compares his earthly father, Joseph, to his divine Father of Truth and his earthly mother, Mary, to his divine Mother, the Holy Spirit.
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Later a number of Christian mystics, like Julian of Norwich, Jacob Boehme, and others, drew on the Gnostic tradition in their development of God as Divine Mother. Boehme particularly recovered the idea of Sophia as the female aspect who existed with the masculine God before creation.

All of this material suggested to me that in the scriptures, in the Gnostic roots of Christianity, there really did exist a concept of the Feminine Divine. But it was also true, as Rosemary Radford Ruether pointed out, that while the Goddess was behind the image of Sophia or Wisdom, in Hebrew thought she never became a fully autonomous, divine female manifestation but rather remained a dependent expression or attribute of God.
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Still, it heartened me that something of her was there in the early fabric of Christianity, even if most of her threads had been obscured or torn away. Recovering the Sacred Feminine is not completely foreign to and outside of Christianity but is in some way a fulfillment of its original potential and intent.

The summer before, while visiting Meinrad Craighead in New Mexico, she'd shown us some of the paintings that were going to be included in a new book of her art. I recalled the one portraying Wisdom—the woman in a red-hooded cloak flanked by two owls—entitled
Hagia Sophia.
At her belly was the divine womb, pictured as a labyrinth.

The image had lingered in me. Now as winter deepened and I continued my study of Sophia, I had a dream:

I am walking into the basilica of an old church where it seems I've been many times before. But looking up, I am awed to find it now holds the vast image of Sophia painted across the ceiling in brilliant colors, the same image that had been in Meinrad's painting
Hagia Sophia.

I knew then a remarkable thing was happening in me. Brightly hued feminine images were emerging; they were being painted across the old “church spaces” inside.

THE SYMBOL FUNCTIONS

As I grounded myself in Divine Feminine imagery, it had an unforeseen, yeastlike impact on my consciousness. Elizabeth A. Johnson expresses the dynamic succinctly: “The symbol of God functions.” By this she means that the symbol gives rise to ways of thought and patterns of behavior. The core symbols we use for God represent what we take to be the highest good. They become “the ultimate point of reference for understanding experience, life and the world.”
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These symbols or images shape our worldview, our ethical system, and our social practice—how we live and relate to one another.

For instance, Johnson suggests that if a religion speaks about God as warrior, using militaristic language such as how “he crushes his enemies” and summoning people to become soldiers in God's army, then the people tend to become militaristic and aggressive.

Likewise, if the
key
symbol of God is that of a male king (without any balancing feminine imagery), we become a culture that values and enthrones men and masculinity.

I had spent nine months immersed in Divine Feminine symbols. As spring approached I was riveted by a question: What will Divine Feminine symbols create among us when integrated into the symbology we now have? What new ways of thinking, living, and acting will emerge?

THE DAWN OF FEMININE SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

March, month of sweeping wind and spring's slow coming. One day I worked in the backyard garden, planting three young cedar trees. I dug three holes in the earth, tucked the cedars inside, and patted the dirt around them. Along with the oaks, pines, tea olive,
and azalea already growing, the cedars helped form an irregular circle. A circle of trees.

I dragged the hose over, watered the new trees, then sat down to rest. Coins of light moved under the branches where a few late crocuses protruded. Earlier I'd placed a white stone the size of a pumpkin in the middle of the trees and hung wind chimes from the limbs. Now that the “circle of trees” was taking shape here in my backyard, I felt I was bringing the journey home to the ordinary dimensions of my life, rooting it in the place I lived every day.

I lay back on the earth and looked up through the branches of an oak, feeling suddenly like the sun was my own heart pulsing up there with light. Wind swirled, and it seemed to me it was my own breath billowing through the branches. The crocus bulbs were buried in my tissue, the cedars growing from my body. The birds flew inside me. Stones sat along my bones.

It was a jubilant, stunning loss of boundary, a deeper sense of oneness than I'd ever felt. I knew myself not separate from anything. I
knew
that I was part of one vast, universal quilt, as one writer says, “a kind of invisible quilt that has creation stitched into it.”
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I knew that this quilt was itself, the Holy Thing, the manifestation of the Divine One. And I loved this universal quilt, every stitch, color, and fiber, with a heartbreaking love.

It was one clear moment in time. Like going to the Deep Ground that underlies all things and seeing, really seeing, what is and being pierced by the unbounded nature of it.

The experience I had in my backyard revealed to me a new feminine consciousness that grows out of feminist spiritual awakenings, initiations, and groundings.

It is first of all a consciousness of
we
, in which relationship with all that is is held in primacy. It is a consciousness of mystical oneness and interconnection. Second (and growing out of the first), it is a consciousness of resacralized nature, one in which the earth is alive and divine. And third, it is a consciousness of liberation, thrusting a woman into the struggle for value, dignity, and power for every human.

What gives rise to these three layers of overlapping consciousness?

Herself, of course.

We-Consciousness

We-consciousness is knowing and feeling oneself intimately connected with and part of everything that is, and coming to act and relate out of that awareness. It is experiencing oneself not as I, but as We. To carry this consciousness is to come to the bare mystery of it all, that we are all one in the universe.

Beatrice Bruteau writes, “The question is: How big is your ‘we'?”
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Who knows, our future on this planet may hang on how we come to answer that question.

For a long time we've lived under an illusion of separateness. We've lived as detached egos, unaware that we're part of a vast fabric of being, a divine and communitarian oneness. Now we're learning from the new sciences that the universe has actually been constructed as a We. Everything in creation—oceans, whales, mountains, humans, eagles, roses, giraffes, and viruses—is a dance of subatomic particles. Fields of energy flow and mingle together. They are all stitched into the cosmic quilt, which underlies and gives rise to everything.

When we relate to Herself, we're inviting a new force to bring us into relationship with this whole. Goddess is that which unites, connects, and affirms the interrelatedness of all life, all people. Being related is at the core of Divine Feminine Being. She is the dance of relation, the mystery of the Divine communing with Herself in all things.

Connectedness is intrinsic in female life, and certainly when we envision the Divine as female we release a new and unique emphasis on relationship.

Her love is primarily envisioned as Mother love, a love that, as Sallie McFague argues, is unifying and reuniting, nonhierarchal and inclusive.
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Despite loving descriptions of Father God in the scriptures, our perception of Father love has sometimes retained a
kind of distance about it. This distance emanates from the classical approach to theology that dominated until modern times. Called
theism
, it shaped many of our ideas about how God relates to the world. Theism held that God was basically unrelated to the earth and should not be identified with the world. “He” was beyond it, over it. In theism God is distant, at the top of a heavenly hierarchy—the ruling king high in heaven. We're all familiar with the image of God as the white-bearded man on a throne in the sky. Theism emphasized God's transcendence, “his” untouchability, dominance, power, kingship, and judgeship.

This view has broken down considerably in present-day theologies, but nevertheless, Father love has often retained a faint theistic tone.

The world has not really tried divine love as Mother love. But when it does, divine love may break upon us with fresh and unexpected intimacy, shattering these theistic traces in a dramatic way.

I know of nothing needed more in the world just now than an image of Divine presence that affirms the importance of relationship—a Divine Mother, perhaps, who draws all humanity into her lap and makes us into a global family. Many have suggested that having only parental models of the Divine works to idealize and overemphasize our role as children, fostering dependent and infantile patterns rather than full, responsible personhood. Considering that, we could also image a Female Friend, whose model of relating is symbolized by a web of interconnection. We could also consider the Divine as Sister, seeing her in the mutual dance of love that is ideally reflected between sisters.

I remember the aftermath of the fights I had with my brothers when I was a girl, the way my mother would draw us together and say, as if introducing us to one another, “This is your brother. And this is your sister. No matter how angry you get, there's nothing as important as that.”

She would make us stand there without speaking and gaze into each other's faces for a whole two minutes without looking away, and it would become impossible not to take him in, not to grin at
him and understand that he was my brother. And what mattered next to that?

This is what feminine love does. It reunites us with each other, with nature, with the whole. It causes us to look deep into the face of whatever is before us and understand that it is our very sister we are gazing upon. And more than that, it is our very selves.

The fact is, we all come from the same womb and are related in ways we haven't yet allowed ourselves to experience. Through the body parable of pregnancy we learn how our lives indwell one another. As one spiritual feminist wrote, “Certainly the distinction between me and not me becomes a little blurry, to say the least, when one is inhabited as a mother.”
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We-consciousness means carrying that pregnant sense of being spiritually inhabited.

I had a memorable experience of we-consciousness breaking through one rainy afternoon in my study. Spring had almost gone, and I was primed with nearly a year of grounding myself in Divine Feminine imagery. I was reading an interview with philosopher Jean Houston. She referred to her work with dolphins, pointing out that they have evolved millions of years more than humans, that they don't have wars or attack each other, and that they don't experience the levels of anxiety we do. She said dolphins do real work, use language, play using a high degree of whimsicality, and even seem to reflect on death, exhibiting high concern when one of their members dies. All this was quite interesting, but then Houston said something that totally captivated me. She said there seems to be evidence dolphins are beaching themselves out of despair when caught in polluted water.

Suddenly I was engulfed by an image—dolphins despairing, weeping over what humans are doing to their waters. I sat still, gazing through the window, my heart starting to burn in a strange way. I tried to imagine what it was like to be a dolphin. I took myself out of the skin-encapsulated ego I often walked around in and placed myself in the sleek body of a dolphin. I imagined swimming waters laced with drift gill netting, poisoned with billions of tons of toxic waste, oil, and sewage.